Global Warming: ‘Union of Concerned Scientists’ — A Misnomer?

An interesting comment posted to our piece below on global warming. It says in part,

“The Union of Concerned Scientists is comprised almost entirely of concerned citizens, not scientists at all. They took my money with no questions asked besides, “Will that be credit card or check?”

So we moseyed on over to their website, since they’ve been such gadflies on this global warming hysteria, quoted almost everywhere. And the name sounds so compelling. Well, from the looks of their website, sure ’nuff our commenter is right — anyone can join. Among the concerned scientists on their board is one Nancy Stephens, listed as an “actress and political activist”. She’s acted in such climatological romps as “Death Car on the Freeway” and “Cheers“. So it’s not really 100,000 scientists, it’s 100,000 (if you believe that number) people, some of whom may or may not be scientists. Big difference, no? Heck, maybe we should start a group called, “Climatologists United to Discredit the Theory of Global Warming.” Who cares if was just a bunch of blog readers? We could testify and issue pronouncements under our presumptuously misleading name. And people would buy it!

In any event, the sad fact is that these folks are all part of the effort to discredit courageous scientists who actually have the temerity to take issue with the theory of global warming. It’s funny, the more you know about this issue, the weaker their arguments become.

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The solution to global warming need not and should involve requiring Western society to go on some energy starvation diet.

I maintain in my book PRIORITY ONE Together We Can Beat Global Warming that we can keep our high standard of living. (PRIORITY ONE is freely available at yeomansplow.com.au) We can have as many cars as we want and they can be as big as we desire. Our affluent society can be even more affluent. Because fundamentally we are not short of anything, energy or raw materials, and we never will be. For us to continue, and to continue to improve our health and wealth and standard of living the only things we must change is our support for countries and industries that mine and sell fossil carbon based materials.

There are just four requirements to end cancerous climate change.

FIRST We remove the current excess carbon dioxide from our atmosphere that our use of fossil carbon materials have added. We use plants to extract it, and then turn it into masses of soil organic matter – and so produce rich healthy productive soil. We do this by switching to organic type agricultural practices. Recognize that past soil fertility losses in the Great Plains contributed as much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as came from all the cars Detroit ever built. We simply reverse that process.

SECOND For our mobile transport – cars trucks busses and airplanes, we switch totally to ethanol and biodiesel – produced from sugarcane and grains, and oil palms and oil seeds. Both these biofuels are economically practical and utterly feasible.

Tropical Africa could fuel Europe and Asia. Brazil could easily fuel the Americas – both north and south. America imports its petroleum fuel. So too it can import its biofuels. (And subsidize its local farmers if it wishes.) To make all this happen we must demand the elimination of all taxes and all excises on biofuels and we must set a minimum petroleum oil price of something over $60 per barrel so oil interests can not continue to juggle the oil market to kill biofuel development.

THIRD For large-scale industrial power generation we must accept, weather we like on not, the reality that nuclear energy is our only feasible option – and it’s safer and it’s unbelievable abundance.

Nuclear energy admittedly, is a highly emotive subject. In my book PRIORITY ONE I describe and catalogue the history and the motives behind the creation of the well funded, and vociferous anti-nuclear movement. I also demonstrate that moderate levels of nuclear radiation, (just like sunlight) are a noticeable health benefit and actually increase longevity.

FOURTH Sadly, we can no longer trust the motives of all too many environmental movements. To maintain the sale of oil fuels, petrochemicals and agrochemicals, global warming issues have to be consistently and systematically defused. It is logical and astute public relations to fund, to infiltrate and then influence and modify the aims and objectives of all major environmental movements (and governments).

If the end result of some environmental campaign results directly or indirectly in the increased sales of fossil fuels or agrochemicals, they should not be supported nor trusted. Patric Moore was one of the founders of Greenpeace. However he now believes we should adopt nuclear energy. So Greenpeace vilify him. Another example, throughout Australasia, the giant BP Oil Company was run by Greg Bourne. He moved sideways and now runs the World Wide Fund for nature, the WWF – the one with the Panda logo.
“—-but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time”

Global warming is happening now and is already proving enormously expensive in life and property and decreased living standards. It’s frightening, and it’s much worse than we are ever encouraged to believe. Being convinced is not enough. We all must convince others.

UCSUSA has never hidden the nature of their membership (their slogan, after all, is “citizens and scientists for environmental solutions”).

They’re an interesting organization, that actually became a “player” on the national scene during the SDI/Star Wars debates of the 1980s.

Before relying too much on Mr. Lindzen’s WSJ article, wouldn’t it be prudent to actually investigate some of his claims?

For instance, you can read Henk Tennekes’ views on global warming — Tennekes is involved in the blogosphere. Maybe you could even ask him to guest post on his experience (henktennekes@kpnplanet.nl)? I’ve used Nexis & Google to search for any information on Tennekes’ dismissal, but found nothing; he is consistently described as “retired.” He seems like an engaging writer, with legitimate conservative instincts regarding scientific certainty.

Likewise, I could find nothing on Aksel Winn-Nielsen (who’s name is more commonly aglicized as Wiin rather than Winn)/Bert Bolin, or any of the other anecdotes Mr. Lindzer uses. What are we to make of the lack of public record for his charges?